Floorball is an indoor stick-and-ball sport that borrows heavily from ice hockey but strips away the skates and the physical contact. Two teams of players use lightweight plastic sticks to pass and shoot a perforated plastic ball into their opponent’s goal, moving around a hard indoor court surrounded by low boards. It began in Scandinavia in the 1970s and has since spread across Europe, Asia and North America, with a growing following in India as well.
Objective
The aim is to score more goals than the opposition by shooting the ball into their goal, using a stick to control, pass and strike it. Players cannot touch the ball with their hands, and only the goalkeeper is allowed to use their body to stop shots, doing so without a stick while kneeling or crouching in the goal area.
Rules and regulations
- Matches are contested five players against five, plus a goalkeeper each, with squads allowed further substitutes who can come on and off during play, much like ice hockey.
- High sticks, tripping, hooking and playing the ball above knee height are all penalised, usually with a two-minute spell in the penalty box for the offending player, leaving their team a player short.
- Deliberately raising the stick dangerously or checking an opponent’s body, rather than just their stick, is also punished.
- The International Floorball Federation reviews its rulebook regularly, and the latest edition, which took effect in 2026, sharpened rules around protecting goalkeepers from collisions, tidied up how penalty shootouts are run and made some holding offences easier for referees to call consistently.
- These changes are aimed at keeping the game flowing rather than at altering its basic structure.
Equipment and playing area
- A floorball court measures around 40 metres long and 20 metres wide, enclosed by boards about half a metre high that keep the ball in play off rebounds, much like an ice rink.
- Goals sit at each end, roughly 1.6 metres wide and 1.15 metres high.
- Sticks are made of lightweight composite materials, capped in length, and the ball is a light plastic sphere with holes punched through it to keep its flight predictable indoors.
- Floorball’s international governing body, the International Floorball Federation, is based in Finland and oversees World Championships across several age groups.
- In India, the sport is still developing but has an affiliated national federation and fields men’s and women’s national teams that have taken part in Asian and world-level competition.
Scoring
- Every legal shot that fully crosses the goal line between the posts and under the crossbar counts as one goal, regardless of which player or body part last touched it, provided no hand or arm was involved illegally.
- Matches are usually split into three periods of twenty minutes each, and the team with more goals after all three periods wins.
- Level scores in knockout matches typically go to extra time and then a penalty shootout if needed.
